The Realms of the Elves a-11 Page 10

  He crossed quickly to the wide doorway that emptied into the foyer. He stepped out onto the checkerboard marble tiles, his boots clicking and sending a rattle of sharp echoes up the soaring stairway.

  "Chasianna!" he shouted again, waiting as his voice followed the footstep echoes up the stairs. Again, there was no answer.

  Something madehim keep walking, stopping at the foot of the stairs. He'd opened his mouth to shout for her again when he heard it. At first it sounded like a scream, and that sent a cold chill racing down Valmaxian's spine. It wasn't a scream, though. It was a less natural, less elven sound. It sounded like wind whistling through-through what? Rocks? A narrow canyon?

  Valmaxian didn't stop to think why he might have drawn that specific conclusion. Instead he raced up the stairs trailing his robe and the staff-held firmly in one hand, the other sliding up along the banister-behind him.

  "Chasianna!" he shouted at least once more as he ascended the stairway.

  His legs began to ache as he rounded the top of the stairs, but he ignored the pain. He came to the wide double doors-closed-to Chasianna's bedchamber and realized two things at the same time: the upstairs maid was not there to open the doors for him, and there was a bright red light-wholly unlike the warm orange glow of Chasianna's hearth fire-burning from under the door.

  Valmaxian put a hand to the wrought-iron door handles and recoiled from the heat. He cursed and gathered up a corner of his robe, using it like a potholder to open the door. He stepped into a blast furnace.

  Chasianna's personal suite was large, befitting a woman of her class. Where Valmaxian expected to see a wall some hundred feet in front of him, where the bed would be, there was nothing. It seemed as if the whole side of the house, with the servant's wing behind it, had been broken off. The room had been opened to the outside, but it was not Siluvanede Valmaxian saw there. The "outside" was a blasted landscape of sand and rock-dead, barren, and bathed in a blood-red light. The wind poured out of it in unnaturally sustained waves of near-blistering heat. The air held a foul odor-no, a thousand foul odors-and searing grains of white-hot sand.

  Valmaxian stood at the doorway of his lover's bedchamber and stared straight into the depths of the Abyss itself.

  "Chasianna!"

  A figure stepped out from behind a twisted spur of wind-carved rock.

  Valmaxian stepped forward, the staff tapping the floor next to him, and said, "Chasianna… is it you?"

  A second figure eased from around another rock, then a third, and a fourth. Valmaxian stepped forward again, his heart beating rapidly, sweat beginning to pour from him in sheets.

  More of them appeared from the sand-blown air of the Abyss. They were bent, bloated forms not unlike elves in that each had two arms, two legs, and a head. The comparison stopped there. None of them stood more than four feet tall. Their pale, gray skin shone almost purple in that hellish light. Their mouths hung open, revealing irregular rows of serrated fangs. From the tips of their chubby, almost childlike fingers grew long, heavy claws. There were more than a dozen of them, and when Valmaxian stopped moving they rushed forward.

  Valmaxian thrust the staff out in front of him and spoke the now-familiar command. Bolts of arcane energy spat from the tip of the staff-five of them-and split into separate paths on their way to the bloated humanoids. Five of them fell, but the others came forward, so Valmaxian sent five more missiles into their midst and dropped five more.

  He could kill many of them that way, but for every five that fell, seven or eight more appeared from the rocks and concealing wind behind them. Valmaxian spoke a different command. The first little demon that touched what Valmaxian had conjured in front of him recoiled in unhurt surprise from the solid wall that was there but could not be seen. The other little demons-dretches, Valmaxian recalled-railed against the wall, pounding at what looked like thin air, scratching at it, even biting it.

  Valmaxian stepped through the gate and felt as if he was falling. The effect passed a heartbeat later and he was aware of the heat radiating from the coarse sand. It started to burn his skin, as hot as a summer sun, and he could feel it on the soles of his feet even through his sturdy boots.

  Valmaxian looked up and caught the eye of a particularly bulbous dretch on the other side of the invisible wall. The thing bared its spiny teeth at him. Its eyes bulged and its nostrils flared. Valmaxian felt a shiver course through his sweating arms. He drew in a breath and held it, then realized the thing was using magic. Valmaxian shrugged it off. He would not be scared away that easily. He would not be scared at all.

  Valmaxian smiled and started to utter the complex words of a spell. The dretch wanted to scare him, but Valmaxian knew how to scare people too, and he knew how to do it better. The spell rolled off his tongue, and his hands traced the intricate patterns in the air in front of him. Valmaxian could feel the energy burst out of him. He couldn't see anything, but he knew the dretch and several of its rotund companions could. They saw their worst nightmares, their most vile imaginings, the terror that consumed their hearts, smash into their fragile psyches and explode. They ran, losing their water on the burning sands, screaming, gibbering in some freakish Abyssal dialect that Valmaxian was glad he couldn't understand.

  Not all of them ran, though. There was a way around the wall of force and a few of the dretches found it. That was enough to lead the others in that direction. Dozens more kept drifting out from behind stones, and a few even dug their way from under the sand like zombies rising from the grave. Valmaxian peppered them with glowing missiles of concentrated Weave. He dropped five at a time: five, ten, fifteen, twenty…

  One dretch got within a few paces of Valmaxian and spat out a cloud of gas. The vapor seemed to stick in the wind, moving with it but not as quickly as the sand that passed through it. It coalesced into a cloud of greenish gray smoke that looked like a miniature thunderhead. Valmaxian could smell the cloud from several paces away, and it almost made him gag. The smell was indescribable. Valmaxian rattled through another spell and held his arms out on each side of him. He roared an incoherent challenge, and a rush of wind spread out, knocking a few of the little demons off their feet and sending the roiling cloud of reek scattering into the blowing sand.

  He'd had to concentrate at least a little to cast the spell, and in the time his attention was occupied a dretch drew sharp, jagged claws across his midsection. Valmaxian hissed in pain and struck out at the dretch with the staff. The fine weapon pulped the creature's head, spraying green and gray fluids across the sand in front of Valmaxian. Another of the little demons came up to take the headless dretch's place, and Valmaxian swung the staff around, smacking it into the thing's chest hard enough to shatter ribs, break skin, and spill out the fiend's stomach. It died squealing, then everything went dark.

  It wasn't a natural darkness. It wasn't night, and Valmaxian wasn't blind. It was a darkness that only the Weave could create. Valmaxian reacted quickly. He could hear more of the things near him and getting closer. He hissed through a spell and felt his skin tighten, felt something touch him in an angry, violent manner, but it didn't hurt. There came a clang like something hard banging on steel. Valmaxian smiled, though it wasn't easy since his spell had turned his skin to iron.

  A dretch grabbed his right leg, but Valmaxian couldn't see it. He felt another hand on his side, an arm beginning to encircle his waist. He muttered a command word, and the lighting returned to its normal dull red as he used the staff to kill the dretches that were trying to drag him down. Their brains were smooth and yellow.

  With magic missiles he dropped a few more that had dared to come close under cover of the darkness. Valmaxian knew he had to face the fact that the dretches would always be more afraid of En'Sel'Dinen than they would be of him, no matter how many spells he cast or how many he killed.

  The elf mage looked up and counted the dretches as they came at him. He dropped a few with magic missiles as they came too close, but he stepped back to buy himself time as well. He watched
where they were coming from, how they all moved just a little bit to one side, how they congregated in the entrance to a narrow, windswept gorge. He saw them blocking his way, but only in that direction. Valmaxian was smarter than he needed to be to understand that the dretches were guarding the gorge-guarding the way to En'Sel'Dinen, and Chasianna.

  Valmaxian turned that way and started walking. Some of the dretches in front were brave enough or scared enough to lunge at him. He killed some by smashing the staff into their heads. Others he killed with magic missiles. Some he killed with spells. The smell of the internal organs of the little fiends, their sweat, panic, and blood filled the stinging air along with the sand. Valmaxian didn't bother counting how many he killed. It might have been thousands.

  It just went on and on.

  The demon had torn off all of her clothes, and Chasianna's skin blazed red in the oppressive heat of the Abyss. Her hands were bound behind her back and she was gagged to keep her from casting spells. En'Sel'Dinen held her long hair tightly in one of his massive hands. A tear traced a path down one of her grimy cheeks, and her eyes were red and puffy. Deep cuts crisscrossed her arms, and her knees bled. Bruises blossomed all over her. She was a mess, but the fact that she was alive made her the most beautiful thing Valmaxian had ever seen.

  "Demon" Valmaxian called, tensing his chest to hold back a body-racking cough.

  En'Sel'Dinen smiled. The dretches surrounding him scurried into hiding among freakish stone statues that littered the wind-blasted plain. The demon's silver eyes shone red in the deep orange light that seemed to come from the sky itself. There was no sun. There was nothing so logical and steadfast as that in the chaotic depths of the endless Abyss.

  "Ah, Valmaxian," En'Sel'Dinen rumbled, "at last. Bravo on the dretches, my old friend. It's been hours since I've seen so many dispatched so quickly."

  Valmaxian ignored the demon and looked at Chasianna. "Are you-?" he started to ask.

  "She won't be answering, elf," the demon interrupted. "She belongs to me now-in body if not in soul."

  Valmaxian, Chasianna's voice rang in the Gold elfs head, blink if you can hear me.

  Valmaxian blinked, and Chasianna let her head fall in relief.

  How are you doing this? Valmaxian thought.

  "I was right about her skin, my friend," the demon growled. "It's soft as the guts of a dragon. But I will have to empty her willful mind."

  He'll hear soon, Chasianna answered. You can defeat him, but it will mean draining the staff.

  "I know," Valmaxian answered aloud.

  En'Sel'Dinen looked down at Chasianna, the twisted smile fading quickly. "Bitch," the demon growled. "That little trick will be the first to go."

  The demon opened his fang-lined mouth and leaned toward the girl at the same time he pulled her closer to him.

  Valmaxian shouted a command word, and a flurry of white-hot spheres blasted from the staff and pounded into the demon with enough force to topple a keep on Toril.

  The demon shrieked, more in surprise than pain, and tossed Chasianna to the burning ground.

  The fiend spun on Valmaxian and screamed, "She's mine! You were paid in full!"

  "I'm ending our arrangement, demon," Valmaxian said, "and I'm taking her with me."

  En'Sel'Dinen lunged forward and his eyes blazed. Valmaxian felt his heart skip a beat, and a wave of pain twisted his chest and drove him to his knees. He tried to breathe in but couldn't. The skin on his face burned. His right hand tightened on the staff, causing his forearm to cramp.

  "Heartstop," the demon said, "is what the humans on your world call it, elf. You have seconds to live."

  Valmaxian couldn't speak, couldn't even stand. He looked up at Chasianna lying on the sandy ground, her eyes wide and terrified. He could almost see himself, weak and dying, reflected in those eyes.

  He broke the staff.

  Retributive strike-it was a power he'd hope to gain from the demon but had always had inside him. He could have added it to the staffs many powerful enchantments himself, but it would have required such a sacrifice of magic and personal energies that it would have left him with hardly the power of a novice spellcaster. He'd traded Chasianna's freedom, her body, and his own soul for it, but he had one chance to take it all back.

  The staff broke apart, and the sound was almost enough to drown out the demon's scream.

  Valmaxian felt a wave of cold wash over him. The pain in his chest eased just enough for him to force a gasp of air into his lungs. He felt a rough, hot hand on his shoulder, felt himself tossed to one side to land with a scraping skid on the coarse sand. He felt the staff fall from his hand. He heard the demon scream again, and there was a shouted string of words so arcane and foul Valmaxian's ears began to bleed from the sound of them.

  "Chasianna," Valmaxian gasped, "I'm sorry."

  The sound stopped all at once and silence fell over them like a shroud. The pain and tightness in Valmaxian's chest was gone, and he found he could breathe. The cold was gone too, replaced by the scorching dry air of the Abyss. Valmaxian spat out a mouthful of burning sand and coughed enough to make his vision blur. He blinked away the tears that filled his eyes and looked up. Chasianna struggled to a sitting position. New bruises, cuts, and scrapes covered what little of her hadn't been bruised, cut, or scraped before. She coughed too, but managed to catch Valmaxian's gaze. The gag hung off her face. She opened her mouth to speak, but it was the demon Valmaxian heard.

  "That was very, very close, elf," the monster said, its voice somehow less forceful, quieter.

  Valmaxian looked over at the source of the voice and had to struggle to keep from retching. The demon had been blasted into pieces-chunks really-by the force of the staffs retributive strike. Blood so dark red it was almost black had splattered everywhere, and one of the demon's powerful legs twitched on the sand a good ten yards from the hip it had once been attached to. The demon looked at Valmaxian with only one eye, the other lost to the ruin the left half of the creature's face had become. His head, attached to only one shoulder and one arm, rolled on the gore-soaked ground. The demon's torso had been split diagonally down the middle, and his right arm was nowhere to be seen. In his left hand he held the shredded, shortened remnants of the staff.

  Valmaxian struggled to his feet, but found himself falling more than walking to Chasianna's side.

  "You are a fool," the demon called after him. "What's left of your greatest creation will make a mockery of your wasted life."

  Valmaxian ignored him. Pain flared in dozens of places around his body and he could feel a palpable sense of emptiness. Valmaxian would return to Siluvanede and his studio with less command of the Weave than any of his assistants, and no staff to show for it. He would indeed be ruined.

  "Valmaxian," Chasianna said. "Untie my hands."

  "Ruined," the demon muttered, with perhaps the slightest trace of regret. "The great Staff of Valmaxian in splinters."

  Valmaxian struggled with the bonds, but Chasianna's hands soon came free. She drew in a breath and started to work a spell.

  "Hold on to me," she whispered in his ear.

  "Ruined!" the demon shrieked in impotent rage, unable to stand, unable to kill the two elves who were already fading from sight. "You have nothing!"

  "Hold on to me," Chasianna whispered again as the sound of the wind faded around them. "We're going home."

  Valmaxian closed his eyes, held on tight, and smiled.

  The last sound they heard in the Abyss was the demon En'Sel'Dinen, lying in pieces on the sand, screaming, "You have nothing, elf! You have nothing!"

  The demon was wrong.

  NECESSARY SACRIFICES

  Lisa Smedman

  The Year of the Behir (1342 DR)

  Corwyn followed the brunette down the narrow cellar steps, admiring the sway of her hips. She moved down like a dancer, in time with the music that filled the tap room of the inn above. The Old Skull Inn might have a reputation for drawing unsavory characters, but the women Jhaele
hired to wait tables more than made up for it. This one had the most delicious laugh, and hips like…

  Something was wrong. The brunette had stopped at the bottom of the stairs. She stood rigid, staring at something on the floor. Beyond her, in the darkened cellar, a shadow shifted.

  Instantly sober, Corwyn drew his short sword. He stepped past her, sweeping her behind him with one arm.

  A twang sounded from the far corner of the cellar. Pain lanced into Corwyn's thigh. He didn't stop to glance down at the wound.

  "Up the stairs," he shouted, giving the brunette a shove. At the same time, he marked a dim patch of white hair against ebony skin. Drow.

  He charged, thrusting at the dark elfs chest. The drow dodged the blade with uncanny speed, simultaneously spinning and slamming a foot into the back of Corwyn's knee.

  Corwyn stumbled, but managed to dodge the dagger that slashed at his arm. That it hadn't been a thrust for the vitals told him something: the dagger must be poisoned. Reeling back to his feet, the bolt in his thigh a hot point of pain, he somehow managed to catch the drow's wrist with his free hand. The wrist was sticky, coated in something that allowed Corwyn to maintain his grip. He slammed the dark elfs hand into the wall, and heard the knife clatter to the floor.

  The drow spat a word at Corwyn-a curse. Then he wrenched his wrist free and spun. An elbow slammed into Corwyn's temple. Blinking stars, Corwyn staggered back, sword loose in his hand. He flailed with it as the dark elf retreated, and heard the sound of wood sliding against stone then only the sound of his own harsh breathing and feet pounding down the stairs.

  His foot slid on something: Spilled blood.

  That was when he looked down and saw the boy.

  The Year of Moonfall (1344 DR)

  Blowing snow stung SorrelPs face as he trudged through the forest. As the curtain of white shifted, the trees that surrounded him were screened from sight, then reappeared again. High above in the creaking branches, the elves of Cormanthor-his People-sat snug behind shuttered windows in their treetop homes, celebrating Midwinter Night. He caught the faint smell of mulled wine and onion-baked venison, and heard snatches of song over the shrill of the wind.